Lyotard's Postmodern Ethics and the Normative Question

Abstract

By normative I mean the age-old question Why should I be moral? To ask this question is to ask for justification of morality's claims on us, or for justification of the obligations of morality. The first systematic attempt to answer this question was made nearly 2500 years ago by Plato when it was put to him by Glaucon. The fact, if it is fact, that there is still no satisfactory answer to this question after 2500 years, that moral skepticism, even nihilism, is still serious threat, is, to paraphrase Kant, scandal of moral philosophy. As if out of fear of an outbreak of the scandal, or perhaps in an attempt to contain it, many philosophers have recently revisited the normative question and tried to answer it. Notable recent efforts include Michael Smith's The Moral Problem and Christine Korsgaard's Sources of Normativity.1 The history of philosophy shows clearly enough that the posed by the normative question is vexing. It is also true that failure to address the is scandalous. To avoid the scandal, or to counter moral skepticism, we need to tackle the from many different fronts. Philosophers such as Smith and Korsgaard belong to the camp, and their answers to the normative question form parts of the analytical front in the battle against skepticism. The question is whether some advance can be made on moral problem from the front. At first sight, it would appear that, if anything, Continental philosophy is facet of the rather than something that might hold an answer to it. One element of Continental philosophy in particular, namely postmodernism, is often characterized as philosophy that advocates all kinds of nihilism, including moral nihilism insofar as it has anything to say at all about moral questions.2 This is not the place to defend postmodernism, or more accurately philosophy, against such characterization.3 It is sufficient to point out that there is in the writings of Jean-Francois Lyotard, someone most often associated with postmodernism, line of ethical thought coherent and robust enough to be called an ethics. I have defended this claim elsewhere.4 The aim of this essay is to show that Lyotard's ethics is capable of answering the normative question. A summary of the key features of Lyotard's ethics is given in Section I. In Section III discuss how we can extract from it an answer that might satisfy the moral skeptic who wants to know why he or she should be moral, why he or she should stand under some moral obligations. I Three themes stand out in the writings of Lyotard: the death of metanarratives, the differend, and the sublime. A metanarrative is metadiscourse containing universal rules and principles to which we can appeal to resolve dispute that may arise between the or (petits recits) in which different people are engaged. In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard defines postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.5 Thus, in the condition, metanarratives, or metadiscourses, have lost their authority and it is no longer possible to appeal to rules and principles that apply across discourses as source of legitimation. In the condition, there are no universally valid rules and principles. There are only language games, or small discourses, each defined by its own set of rules. In the absence of universally valid metadiscourses, conflict between language games cannot be resolved by appealing to universal rules. Thus, either conflict remains unresolved, or it is dissolved into totality dominated by one of the discourses in conflict. Lyotard calls this kind of conflict the differend, defining it as a case of conflict, between (at least) two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of rule of judgment applicable to both arguments.6 If the condition means the death of metanarratives then the differend is its effect. …